[netfinity]

Those of you that have big pipes (~10Mbit upload and download, or greater) might have noticed that both Windows and eMule becomes slow and unresponsive when the datarates increase.

My research shows that eMule and the virtual memory system in Windows obviously doesn't like each other, so I realised that you can get much better performance if you turn off the page file(s). Before you do that ensure that you atleast have 1GB of RAM as your PC could crash if you run out of memory.

Alternatively you can also buy 0.5GB + your_total_shared_file_size of RAM and install it that will also limit the use of the page file as there is never any need for that much memory but that is in my opinion far to expensive and the question would still be then, why bother with a page file when you have more RAM than you need.

So, my suggestion is get 2GB or more RAM and disable the page file and you will wonder why you haven't done it before. You'll love it!

/netfinity

[Andu]

Isn't it enough to just use a predefined pagefile? I have e.g. set my pagefile to exactly 1GB.

[qm2003]

I guess this only matters when emule uses much, much more than the usual few upload slots.
Say 100+
Right ?

Do you have such a line, Andu ?

Everyone else with "normal" DSL, Cable connections, at least 512 MB RAM and a fixed page size should just be fine.

[netfinity]

@Andu
No, because eMule need a lot of disk cache and causes Windows to flush any memory that hasn't been used for a time to page file and once it's needed again it will have to be reloaded from the disk again, causing the application to halt for a short moment. If those short moments happen very often Windows and eMule will feel slow.

@qm2003
Actually you will benefit from it even when not running eMule as long as you have enought memory. The page file is to solve the immidiate problems when memory is running low.

This post has been edited by netfinity: 30 September 2006 - 02:32 PM

[qm2003]

Hm,
i'll try it.

768 MB RAM should be enough to run without pagefile.

[MadlyMad]

the other way is to buy a little 10.000 RPM Raptor HD, dedicated to the system =)
for about 90€ the 36 GB (in france)

Or a 15.000 RPM SCSI HD, but here the price is more than twice bigger for the same capacity

[celtwolf]

Ill give this a try

[qm2003]

So far, so good.

[Chip Zero]

Oh boy, not that myth again:

Quote

Myth - "Disabling the Paging File improves performance."

Reality - "You gain no performance improvement by turning off the Paging File. When certain applications start, they allocate a huge amount of memory (hundreds of megabytes typically set aside in virtual memory) even though they might not use it. If no paging file (pagefile.sys) is present, a memory-hogging application can quickly use a large chunk of RAM. Even worse, just a few such programs can bring a machine loaded with memory to a halt. Some applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) will display warnings on startup if no paging file is present." - Source

"In modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly. All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer. In the default Windows OS configuration, 2 GB of this virtual address space are designated for each process' private use and the other 2 GB are shared between all processes and the operating system. RAM is a limited resource, whereas virtual memory is, for most practical purposes, unlimited. There can be a large number of processes each with its own 2 GB of private virtual address space. When the memory in use by all the existing processes exceeds the amount of RAM available, the operating system will move pages (4 KB pieces) of one or more virtual address spaces to the computer's hard disk, thus freeing that RAM frame for other uses. In Windows systems, these "paged out" pages are stored in one or more files called pagefile.sys in the root of a partition. Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system." - Source

If you really, really have enough ram you could set the page file to the minimum size of 2 MB (source). But even then I wouldn't recommend it, as you still limit the maximum amount of memory available. You should instead set up a fixed-size swap file; I'm using 3070 MB for my 2GB system.

[netfinity]

Chip Zero, on Sep 30 2006, 06:46 PM, said:

Oh boy, not that myth again:

It's definitly not a myth. It might be under Unix like operatives, but not under Windows. Paging seriously slow down Windows, especially when you have slow harddisks. However, I tried it on a HP Proliant DL380 with 6 SCSI disk in a Raid 5 configuration and the response times where significantly faster after that. On my home PC, I got approx 5 times faster response times when switching between applications.

The problem with the virtual memory in Windows is that the OS tryes to maximise the amount of available memory and constantly flush to disk. This is not so much a problem under normal circumstances, but when an application like eMule is excessivily using the IO cache Windows will flush more memory than what is optimal from a performance point. So, if you have enought memory turning of the page file prevents those memory flushes.

The idea to get rid of the virtual memory actually comes from one of Bill Gates head engineers, who wants to rid it completly from future versions of Windows. Don't recall his name, only read the article in some newspaper a while ago.

[EDIT]I beleive however that you need an NT 5.x or later kernal for this to work properly as I recall I tryed this on Windows 3.11 a long time ago and that caused serious problems as programs refused to work without the page file. That is why I haven't attempted it until now, when I read somewhere that it was possible as long you had the memory. Things change in 12 years![/EDIT]

This post has been edited by netfinity: 30 September 2006 - 05:36 PM

[Dick_Manitoba]

Myth - Everyone needs a pagefile.

I do not question the veracity of those statements. However, let's get real here. There are many of us who are very familiar with our work patterns. If you intimately understand the relationship between RAM and your OS/application requirements of RAM, you can quite easily determine whether or not you need a page file.

For MOST people - I would say greater than 99 percent of the computer using populace - you should let your OS handle the page file as it does in it's default state.

For those that know what they are doing, you can make your own call as to whether you need one or not.

Yes, you could hit that memory brick wall. But if that is the case, you'll know why when you do, or, you do not know your work habits and system intimately, and thus, should not be tinkering with the page file to begin with.

[Chip Zero]

Well, other than causing compatibility problems and limiting the available memory (640 KB ain't enough, Bill), there's another factor. Every time you load a program, it will allocate memory space for its use, even when it may only use a fraction of it later. Windows does lazy allocation, and allocates these unused pages to the virtual memory pool until actually used. This leaves physical memory available for a.o. file caching.

Anyway, for those casual power users that are really sure they don't need the pagefile, again, I recommend that you set it to the minimum size of 2 MB. This way, it won't break compatibility with applications that *require* the presence of a pagefile.

[Gunman99]

Please post some numbers documenting that no pagefile improves performance. What might seem like a good idea may turn out to have no practical impact, or give worse performance.

This post has been edited by Gunman99: 30 September 2006 - 09:22 PM

[harfman]

paging is harmful for OS when such a emule program that requires temporary and random disk I/O.
cache(page) will be filled with garbage stuff and continuossly faulted and eat memory and this decreases performance.
i think that bypassing normal disk I/O of OS will be the solution of this problem, but it is dangerous.

PS: why emule requires so much memory. i have 384M memory and when emule use above 80k my system is burdened.
is there any way that saves memory?

This post has been edited by harfman: 01 October 2006 - 07:15 AM

[qm2003]

Reduce (per! ) file buffer and queue size, refrain from using KAD.
Reduce your number of downloads and found sources.
Don't share thousands of files.

I guess, thats about it.

[Stewe]

qm2003, on Oct 1 2006, 07:22 AM, said:

Reduce (per! ) file buffer and queue size, refrain from using KAD.
Reduce your number of downloads and found sources.
Don't share thousands of files.

I guess, thats about it.

One more thing, reduce the number of uploads to the minimum required to reach the upload cap. The results variates but for me it cuts down the amount of upload slots to about half.

[netfinity]

You can also turn off eMule and swap floppies via snail-mail as in the good old days!

[poutnik]

We from very old good days know floppies are unreliable. Better to print out hexa content of files to paper and use keybord input...
and use its autocorrection feature: keybord=keyboard

This post has been edited by poutnik: 01 October 2006 - 09:02 AM

[AndreyG]

Cheers everyone,

I installed eMule and trying it but never see speed higher then 10kB/s.
While read Help it tells me typical speed 20 - 30 kB/s
Is that true?
If so, how it is possible to download large files in reasonable time?
(for what I want it tells me download time 2days !! something)
Isn't ftp: method faster?

[poutnik]

It is not true. e.g. once I have downloaded 3 GB DVD iso in 4 hours.
Max speed reached my DL 512 kB/s capacity. (Well, it is a positive extrem)
FTP, so does BT is often faster. If you can get everything you want from them, stick with them. ;-)

BTW many people complains about eMule BEFORE they have tried to read helps, guides, FAQs.
Do you think e.g. BT would be so fast, if every user is running hundreds, or even thousands of torrents simultaneously ?

Edit : In some other forums User short after registration is not allowed to post.
This gives him more time for searching and reading, speeding up start of his learning curve...

This post has been edited by poutnik: 01 October 2006 - 07:10 PM